Biography

William H. Hastie was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on November
17, 1904. In 19xx his family moved to Washington, D. C. where
he graduated from Dunbar High School in 1921. Hastie attended
Amherst College in Massachusetts where he graduated first in
his class in 1925. He then taught at New Jersey's Bordentown
Manual Training School until 1927 when he went to law school. In
1930 he earned his LL.B. degree from Harvard University Law
School. While at Harvard, he was on the Harvard Law Review.
Hastie then joined the faculty of Howard University Law School,
and, after being admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in
1931, he entered private practice in association with Charles
Hamilton Houston's law firm of Houston and Houston. In
1933, he earned his Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard
Law School.

In the early 1930s William H. Hastie worked first as a race
relations advisor to the Roosevelt administration, and then
in 1933 became assistant solicitor of the Department of the
Interior.

In 1937 Hastie became the first African-American federal judge
when President Roosevelt appointed him to the bench of the
Federal District Court in the Virgin Islands. Hastie served
on the Virgin Islands bench for two years before returning
to the Howard University School of Law as dean and professor
of law.

During World War II, from 1941 to 1943, William H. Hastie
was a civilian aide to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson. But
On January 15, 1943, he resigned his position to protest racial
segregation and discrimination in the armed forces. Later that
year, the NAACP awarded Hastie its prestigious Springarn Medal "for
his distinguished career as jurist and as an uncompromising
champion of equal justice."

Between 1946 and 1949 Hastie returned to the Virgin Islands,
this time as its first African-American governor. Then in 1949
he was appointed to the Third United States Circuit Court of
Appeals, the highest judicial position attained by an African
American to that time. Hastie served as a Third Circuit judge
for twenty-one years, including from 1968 to 1971 as chief
judge.